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Hang on! 'Meat' is a commodity like everything else. You may as well suggest that (I'm suggesting as well) ' with a limited planet that there is no need to restrict' grain consumption or soya beans or rice or corn or yams or whatever. Making a fetish of one element in the food chain obscures the ecological reality. My argument is that meat production is related to 'meat's' relevance to the environment...and THAT relates to its consumption. That's a basic principle of human evolution: we eat what we can get. Whether we kill or harvest it isn't the point. In rangelands the norm has been to grow meat and eat it BECAUSE horticulture is not an easy fit there. They are brittle landscapes. Every landscape needs animals. It is a ecological fact. And landscapes have evolved in tandem with animals -- even our human farms. As it happens, here in Australia the homo sapiens currently share a continental space where there are 74 million sheep to 23.5 million people with a further beef herd of 13.4 million head. Is that too much grazing? As for your confusing comment: "The only reason why people in the rich countries can eat so much meat is that they also consume the share of the people in the poor countries, and that they pump fossil water using fossil fuels etc. " I don't have the consumption figures on hand for all the 'rich countries' but in the USA the main meat suppliers of imported beef into the US are Australia, New Zealand and Canada. They aren't 'poor countries'. http://beef2live.com/story-beef-imports-country-year-date-0-107548 As well as the US, Australia's primary export market for beef is China, Korea and Japan...and the rise in meat consumption internationally is being registered in the 'poor countries' generally. So I don't get you point at all. Of note is that most Australian lamb exports go to the Middle East http://www.mla.com.au/Prices-markets/Market-news/How-did-2015-fare-for-Australian-lamb-exports-12012015 As for the question of meat consumption per se...indigenous peoples diets are various but here in Australia, as much as I can research,aborigines generally ate more meat -- from various animals -- than the current Australian intake . In the Americas the Plains Indians no doubt ate more meat than their East Coast cousins and the Inuit of the north were/are dependent on hunting for meat. But that varies of course around the planet.Look at legume driven India, for instance. That proves that meat consumption in large quantities isn't nutritionally essential. But no society has existed without using meat or animal products such as milk or hides. However I'm suggesting that large herbivores in most environments may indeed be an ecological necessity. Just as other animals -- pigs, poultry and the like -- may be essential recyclers that consume AND STORE in their flesh what would otherwise be wasted. Yesterday's rotting fruits become tomorrow's bacon. dave riley On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 3:59 PM, <ehr...@marx.economics.utah.edu> wrote: > you are basically saying: if we do it right, we can produce so much with > a limited planet that there is no need to restrict meat consumption, even if > we are 7-9 billion people, and even if climate change drastically > reduces what can be grown where. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
